Count Binface, and the Bus That Never Came

CBS News. First thing — CBS News, on my screen, and before I even got to the words, the page did that thing where it holds you hostage for eleven seconds while a video plays underneath the text you're trying to read, some anchor with a haircut like a wind tunnel yelling about weather in a state I've never been to, and I want it on the record right now, before I say one more thing about anybody's election, that this is not journalism, this is a hallway with a salesman standing in it, and in 1982 the news came out of a box shaped like a box and it stayed there and did not follow you into the kitchen.

Now. Count Binface. I want to say that name again because nobody in this country has ever had a name like that and lived, Count Binface, running against Nigel Farage, in England, in an election, and losing — everybody loses to Farage eventually, that fella's like a toll booth, you go around him or you pay — but the thing is the crowd loved this Binface fella anyway, dressed up like something out of a trash bin, campaigning on nonsense, and getting more warmth out of the room than the man who actually got the seat. And I sat with that for a second and I thought, that's not a British thing, that's a 1982 thing, because in 1982 we had a man on my block, Dorsey — no, wait, it wasn't Dorsey, Dorsey was the one with the Buick, this was the other one, taller, hat, always the hat — who ran for the school board as a joke, put his dog's name on the sign next to his own like they were running mates, and got forty percent of the vote in the precinct behind the Sunoco, forty percent, on a dog ticket, and the actual serious candidate, insurance fella, nice enough, got the seat and never once got applause like that dog got applause, and I don't know what that means but I know it means something and I knew it back then too and nobody would tell me what.

But that's not — I was going somewhere else. Where was I. Right, the costume. Because the thing about Binface, and I want to be fair here, is he's making a point, the papers say, about how the whole business has gotten too serious and too small at the same time, which — see, now that's interesting, because that's exactly what happened to the arcade on Route 9. You remember arcades. No, you don't, nobody does anymore, that's the whole tragedy of it, they got serious — I mean the games got serious, you needed a strategy for Defender, a real strategy, guys had notebooks — and then they got small, the cabinets shrank, the sound got tinnier, and by '85 the whole thing had collapsed into a fella in the mall with a fanny pack selling you tokens like he was doing you a favor. Twenty-five cents. A quarter got you three lives and a look from Sherry behind the counter that I have never since duplicated with any human woman, and I include my late wife in that, God rest her, she'd tell you the same thing herself if she were here, she thought it was funny, we used to laugh about Sherry, Sherry with the — anyway.

Anyway. Binface. There's a costume logic to elections now that I don't think anybody planned and nobody can undo, and here's my actual position, and I want it clearly separated from what a certain kind of fella would say about this, because a certain kind of fella, and you know the type, would tell you this is about "the establishment" and "the real people" and he'd have a flag pin on and a folksy little grin like he invented the folks, and I am not that fella, I want that on the record, I have thrown darts at that fella's face at three separate establishments, because my actual position is the opposite and also the same position depending what day you ask me, my actual position is that the entire apparatus, all of it, every one of them, the man in the costume and the man in the tie, is playing a game that got invented sometime after 1982 and none of them know the real rules because the real rules died with the rest of it, and I could not tell you what the real rules were either, that's the joke, nobody could, they just knew when a thing was fake and when a thing wasn't and now nothing sets off the bell.

And another thing — the bus. The 14 bus. This has nothing to do with any of this but I want it said. The 14 bus ran on a schedule that a man could set his watch to, and I mean that as a fact and not a saying, Pop set his watch to it, actually turned the little dial, 7:52, every day, rain, snow, the one time there was a parade for something I don't even remember what it was for, some general, dead now, dead then too probably, and the 14 came anyway, 7:52, cut straight through the parade route, driver just leaned on the horn and the whole parade parted like it was nothing, like it was the sea and he was somebody. That driver — Pettibone, I want to say, or Pettigrew, one of those, big neck — never said one word to anybody in fourteen years of driving that route, not one word, not "good morning," not "watch your step," nothing, and then one day just didn't show up, no notice, and the 22 driver took the route instead and it was never the same, the 22 driver talked constantly, wanted to be your friend, and I hated him for it, I hated a man for saying good morning to me, and I don't expect you to understand that and I'm not going to explain it further because there isn't more to explain, that's the whole story, he stopped showing up and nobody ever said why and I never rode the 14 again on principle even after they renamed it back.

Where were we. Farage. No — Binface, sorry, and this is the thing, this is exactly the thing, my brain does this now, skips the groove, and television did this to me, I'll say it outright, decades of television did this to my head the way water does it to a stone, and video games too, don't think I'm letting video games off easy just because I brought up the arcade fondly, fondness is not exoneration, a man can love a thing and still testify against it in court. The kids today — and I use "kids" generously, I mean anyone under fifty at this point — cannot hold two consecutive thoughts in their head without a notification arriving to break the chain, and I don't fully exempt myself, I just said fourteen years and forgot what I was proving with it.

Here's what I actually think, and then I'll get to the third story, because I promised myself three and a man keeps his promises even to himself, especially to himself: I think the Binface fella is doing something honest by being dishonest, which is a very 1982 kind of trick, because in 1982 the honest men were mostly running joke campaigns for school board and the serious men were mostly lying to your face about zoning, and somewhere in the forty years since, we let the serious men keep the seriousness and gave the honesty away to a man in a bucket costume, and that's not a policy position, that's a diagnosis, and nobody in Farage's party or the other fella's party or any party going is going to fix it because fixing it isn't the kind of thing a party does, it's the kind of thing a bus driver does by simply showing up at 7:52 whether there's a parade or not, and we don't have that man anymore, he's gone, Pettibone's gone, I already told you that.

Third story, and I'm doing it, hold on — the soda. Kroy's Market had a soda machine, glass bottles, and it took a dime, one dime, and the dime had to go in a certain way, slot up, everybody knew this, except the new fella, DiSalvo's cousin, visiting from — Ohio, I want to say, or maybe it was he'd just come back from somewhere, the Army possibly, this detail keeps sliding on me — who put his dime in wrong four times in a row and lost forty cents to that machine on a Tuesday and stood there red in the face while six of us watched and did not tell him about the slot, not one of us said a word, we just watched him feed that machine like it was a toll he owed, and to this day I don't know why nobody told him, meanness maybe, or just that watching was funnier than helping, and DiSalvo's cousin left town about a year later and I heard — I don't know if this is even true — that he never had a soda again in his life on principle, and if that's true then good for him honestly, a man's allowed a principle, look at me and the 14 bus.

So there it is. Count Binface loses the seat, gets the love, Farage gets the seat, gets the argument, and somewhere in between there's a school board dog nobody remembers and a bus driver who quit without a word and a cousin who swore off soda, and none of it adds up to a lesson, I want to be honest about that, I'm not going to pretend the ending snaps shut like a briefcase, because it doesn't, things didn't snap shut in 1982 either, we just had fewer machines telling us they were supposed to.

And another thing about that CBS page — it never did stop playing that weather video, it's probably still going right now, some other fella's face, some other wind. I never did find out what happened to that hat man's dog either. Nobody would tell me that one either.

— Edgar